In commercial and home vacuum packaging, food is often placed in a plastic vacuum bag and the bag is subsequently evacuated and sealed by a vacuum seal appliance such as FoodSaver® or Seal-a-Meal® sealer. For average homes, such method is too labor intensive and complex for daily food storage. Moreover, the vacuum bag is normally disposed after one use, which is expensive and not environment friendly.
It is also known to place food in a vacuum container and evacuate the container either by connecting the vacuum seal appliance to the container lid via a vacuum tube as taught by FoodSaver® or Seal-a-Meal® sealer or by manually removing air via a check valve in the lid as taught by Wang in U.S. Pat. No. 6,557,462. Such vacuum containers are susceptible to air leakage and plugging of the check valve and vacuum release valve in the lid by food. The check valve and vacuum release valve in the lid are also difficult to clean, which is not desirable for food storage.
In the applicant's earlier invention disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/917,016, it was taught to seal food in existing kitchen containers with a vacuum lid comprising a rigid ring and an elastic membrane attached to the rigid ring.
The present invention is to provide a new vacuum storage device to simplify the process of sealing food and other spoilable products and to solve the problems with the vacuum storage devices described above.